


The War is Never Done

by Saingirl101



Series: Reaper76 Week 2018 [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Romance, M/M, Reminiscing, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 06:50:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13382466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saingirl101/pseuds/Saingirl101
Summary: For Reaper76 Week 2018. Just a short drabble for day 1: “War Buddies” - war/battles"Gabriel Reyes was a man built and draped in the tidings of war."





	The War is Never Done

**Author's Note:**

> Ended up becoming just a short piece on Reaper reminiscing about the war that is his life. Has brief mentions that make it R76 but it is more about the nature of war. Not really sure where I wanted to go for it. I may be doing short drabbles all week. If not, I like how this piece turned out.

** The War is Never Done **

            Gabriel Reyes was a man built and draped in the tidings of war. While Jack had also been born in the horrors of the Omnic Crisis, Gabriel understood the history of what this war made them both. He bore the scars and the memories of what war cost. Life and limb of the innocents, the humanitarians and the brave, were just the tip of the iceberg.

 

Gabriel saw hell in the Omnic crisis. Saw his fellow allies holding bleeding stumps, screaming as their eardrums burst. Stood shell-shocked one moment and the next, gone to the winds of ash and smoke, a crater where their feet once stood. For the other side, he can recall the screeching squawks a bastion would make as he and Jack ripped a panel away from its body, exposing its core, its soul. He remembered the clicking sound of an OR-14 reloading its gun, the thunking sound it would make walking over broken concrete, over rubble, over a mountain of metallic and fleshy corpses left to bake in the fire and the sun.

 

Gabriel never minded the costs of war, even as his fellows approached battle scenes and emptied their stomachs from shock and overwhelming disgust. He never trembled even as they realized the toll of the bloodshed, after ripping the god AI from its nestled core in the Omnium, and his fellow strike team members tried to compartmentalize before the shellshock came in.

 

Gabriel never minded war; he just hadn’t expected that it would become his life forever. He didn’t expect that one war would lead from direct confrontation with terminator molded machines, to back alley dens of drugs and carnage as his stealth soldiers made effortless moves to destroy groups who would see the peace of the world crumble. He realized close to the end, how war became the definition of his life.

 

McCree asked him once, during a silent moment on an assassination mission, waiting for a target to leave a hostile destination, how he could deal so well with war. Some people thought he enjoyed war, others thought he knew that he was smart, could outthink many enemies. Some people thought he was noble.

 

Gabriel could admit this much, he was never noble, and this endless fight was for him, for them. For that blue-eyed man who held his hand as they were pumped full of a cocktail of drugs and medicine meant to shape them from extraordinary men into something godlike, supernatural. For that slight up-curved smile that was directed at him in the quiet lulls when they finally had a moment for each other. For that man who had laid his weight, body and soul, on his wounds in battle, ignoring the bastion Gatling gun fire overhead to keep Gabriel from bleeding out. For the softness of lips, chapped and skin rough from stubble already starting to grow back in shaved, haphazardly in the quiet moments of war, as they kissed softly, sweetly or passionately and desperately.

 

            Gabriel had done it for Jack. For his husband, partner, lover, downfall. Easy during Sep and the Omnic crisis, yet tear-filled and with anger in his lungs as Talon slunk into their ranks at the end of Overwatch’s days. He would always love that man, that kind-hearted, graceful, love-filled man who watched the world crack around him and couldn’t build himself up in the trappings of kindness once the world blew to bits around him.

 

Gabriel understood war and knew he would never escape it as long as he lived, but he had hopped for the sake of Jack’s soul that he could have. They had wanted their legacy to be peace and prosperity, love and adoration; their legacy together was instead the blood of millions and gun smoke. And now, Gabriel has become, as he tried so hard to avoid, that very smoke. For the first time, they play on opposite sides of the chessboard, waiting to see who can outsmart their enemy. But Gabriel bides his time. Jack will never forgive him; never absolve him of his sins for what he has done to infiltrate the snake’s den. That’s fine.

 

            Gabriel is fine to shoulder the burden on his own, if it means someday Jack can find peace, if he lives. Hate and love are opposite side of the same coin. Even though he hates Jack’s weaknesses, his disbelief and his betrayal, he will always love him. He knows that Jack carries a sidearm, that it has several bullets, but one has his own name sketched in for the very end. Gabriel would rather see his dust blown to the winds, never to reform, if it means that talon is destroyed and Jack never gets a chance to use that sidearm. He would rather have jack seething in rage and in hurt as Gabriel shoots his flank, if it gives Jack a drive to fight, to live if he thinks it will spite Gabriel.

 

            So he keeps going, even as the people he once called family hate the monster he knows they think he has become. Because the war is never done and only he understands the new battlefield they stand on. He will form the rift to take down the pieces trying to assemble like a jig-saw puzzle to launch the next Omnic crisis, try to prevent millions more from laying down on blood soaked fields. Because forming a faulty piece means his Jack lives on, even if his soul is corrupted to the last.


End file.
